How to Understand the Fighting in Sudan

Violence erupted this weekend in Sudan as two rival generals battled for dominance, pitting a paramilitary group against the Sudanese Army.

The army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan (widely known as Hemeti), the commander of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary, had been uneasily sharing power since 2019 — first alongside civilian leaders, after a popular revolution toppled Sudan’s longtime dictator, and then after leading a military coup in 2021.

The World Health Organization reported that at least 296 people had been killed and over 3,000 wounded since clashes began on Saturday, although the true toll is likely much higher. As always, my Times colleagues are doing excellent work reporting on the fighting, including live coverage here.

The situation remains unpredictable. But looking at the history of coups — both the successes and the failures — can help put it the week’s chaotic events into clearer perspective.

A failed coup attempt …

The country was on the verge of transitioning to civilian rule in the coming months, leaving the future of the security forces’ power in question. As my colleague Declan Walsh reported, in recent days the generals came tantalizingly close to a deal to defuse their explosive rivalry, and even steer the vast African nation to democracy.

But even as U.N. mediators dined with the generals, both sides were preparing for war. When violence broke out on Saturday, the R.S.F. and Army forces were soon fighting in the street. Both sides have accused each other of starting the fighting, and made conflicting claims about control over important positions like the airport.

“I think if the initial R.S.F. attack had succeeded, everyone would be referring to this as a coup. It was concentrated on the presidential palace, army headquarters, state TV station, and airport — all classic targets when one is attempting to seize power,” said Erica De Bruin, a Hamilton College political scientist who wrote a book about coup prevention. “But because the fighting has dragged out, it looks much bloodier than most coups and appears as if it could even be the start of a civil war.”

… After a successful one

This week’s violence follows a successful 2021 coup by the same two generals who are now fighting each other and who have uneasily shared power for the last 18 months.

In September 2021, as the country appeared to be making faltering progress toward a democratic transition, al-Burhan and Hamdan abruptly seized power, arresting the civilian prime minister with whom al-Burhan had jointly governed since 2019, when a mass public uprising ousted the previous leader, Omar al-Bashir.

The generals appear to have been worried that a democratic transition would jeopardize their substantial economic power, and perhaps their personal freedom as well.

The Sudanese military had extensive control over lucrative state-owned enterprises, including gold mining, livestock exports, construction equipment and, of course, defense contracting.

Both generals had also been deeply involved in Sudan’s war in Darfur, and may have feared that a civilian government could hand them over to the International Criminal Court for trial. The court has charged al-Bashir, the former dictator, with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to his role in the Darfur conflict. Al-Burhan and Hamdan appear to have been concerned that a civilian government might hand al-Bashir over for a trial that could lead to charges against them as well.

Echoing the situation in 2021, this week’s fighting broke out as the country was supposedly preparing for power to be handed back to civilian leaders as part of a Western-backed deal.

An unlikely alliance, under strain from the start

Research suggests that pulling off a coup is a bit like baking a cake: There is a recipe for success, and if you skip a step or leave out an ingredient, you’ll almost certainly end in failure.

And that suggests that this past week’s failed coup may have been a consequence baked in from the beginning.

Successful coups are “coordination games,” Naunihal Singh, a professor at the U.S. Naval College, wrote in the book “Seizing Power,” which examines why coups succeed or fail. Plotters must make their success seem inevitable, convincing other officers and soldiers that their success is assured, and that supporting the plotters is therefore the safest path for self-interested people.

That usually means shoring up support among key players ahead of time, then swiftly taking action to consolidate power before the opposing forces can put on a credible defense. Typical actions include seizing the presidential palace and arresting civilian leaders, taking control over major communications channels like state TV and radio stations (and in more recent years, control over internet access), and then putting on a public show of force by the military, which often rolls into the streets of the capital city en masse to show it is unified behind the plotters.

If any of those ingredients are missing, then the coup’s success will look uncertain, and at that point, support for the plotters tends to drain away. Supporting a failed plot is too risky: individuals who do so could find themselves arrested on treason charges, or worse. And a failed plot could escalate into civil war, with broader negative consequences for the country as a whole, Singh told me.

But the situation is more complicated in countries where security forces outside the military hold significant power, as was the case with the R.S.F. in Sudan. If those forces oppose a coup — or actively try to grab power themselves — then the aura of inevitability can be tarnished in the crucial early hours when the plotters need to consolidate control.

Usually, paramilitary forces have an incentive to resist coups, because once a military seizes power, it tends to try to incorporate any outside security forces into the military hierarchy, De Bruin said. (In her book, she cites examples of coup-installed regimes in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ghana, Argentina, and Ecuador doing just that.)

“Even where police and paramilitary forces do not oppose the coup, their continued presence outside the military chain of command challenges the military’s core interest in preserving a monopoly on the state’s use of force,” she said.

Al-Burhan managed to forge enough of an alliance with Hamdan and his R.S.F. forces to successfully seize power in their 2021 coup. But the alliance was fundamentally unstable.

“Many people were concerned about the possibility of a falling-out between Burhan and Hemeti,” Singh said. “They had never liked each other and they had opposed institutional interests.”

Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, has grown more powerful since 2019, forging an alliance with a group of civilian political parties, and promoting himself as a potential democratic leader. And during the same period, his tensions with al-Burhan, his putative boss within the current government and former coup collaborator, have grown.

But the framework for the western-backed transition to a civilian government called for the R.S.F. to be integrated into the armed forces, potentially placing Hamdan’s troops under greater control by al-Burhan. Hamdan reportedly agreed in principle to the integration, which would effectively disband the R.S.F., but said it would take a decade. Army leaders pressed to get it done within two years.

And so, while this week’s fighting undoubtedly has many different causes, one of the simplest explanations may be that it is the final, violent expression of a problem that has been baked in since the two generals joined together in 2019: the competing interests between their factions, and the explosive tensions that created.

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